Late last week my copy
of Foreign Affairs arrived here in Hollywood, light blue and wrapped in cellophane - one of the two things that arrive here in hard copy.
The other is the Los Angeles Times, but I often review that on the net as they have quality control issues with their
presses and it really is a bother to find something heavy to stretch out the pages that arrive creased and folded into themselves.
It's easier to find out what was in that middle column by calling it up on the computer screen. So Harriet-the-Cat sleeps
on the fresh copy of the Times each morning. She likes how it feels.

The Times is fresh bedding
for the spoiled cat, but Foreign Affairs is slick - all the pages readable, all nicely bound - very professional.
Of course it's for policy wonks, and pricey, but Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, was offered a free year for a friend,
and he thought of me. Three doors down, the new guy, the former New Orleans television news anchor and former lawyer,
has Daily Variety dropped at his door each day. He's one of those people who chucked it all to come to Hollywood
and become a screenwriter. Coming back from the mailboxes with my new issue of Foreign Affairs and a few bills
in hand I glance at his Daily Variety on his doorstep. I'm just not doing this Hollywood thing right. Ah
well, to each his own.

The new issue of Foreign Affairs has the word "China" in big bold letters on the cover,
in red of course. That's the focus. But wouldn't you know, in the world of policy wonks and the fourteen or fifteen
people in the country who are thinking about what to do next about the war in Iraq - the rest either just trust the president
and figure we go on as we have because he says we should, or just don't trust him after all the oops-wrong-reason-for the-war-here's-another
and this-really-is-a-turning-point-this-time-really moments and want out now, or just don't think about the war at all - well,
the article in the September-October 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs that everyone is talking about isn't about China
at all. It's by Andrew Krepinevich and titled How to Win in Iraq.

We can do that?

Krepinevich says we can. We simply use the "oil spot strategy." We stop focusing all our
resources on killing insurgents, and instead pick particular areas, clean them up and provide security for the local population,
and then slowly expand outward. It's like an oil spot on your garage floor, or some such thing. The Foreign Affairs
summary: "Because they lack a coherent strategy, U.S. forces in Iraq have failed to defeat the insurgency or improve security.
Winning will require a new approach to counterinsurgency, one that focuses on providing security to Iraqis rather than hunting
down insurgents. And it will take at least a decade."

Snippets:

Each offensive... sweeping
through the target area and clearing it of any major insurgent forces..... smaller formations... providing local security.
National police would then arrive.... Iraqi army units would switch to intensive patrolling along the oil spot's periphery....
Iraqi and U.S. intelligence operatives... infiltrating local insurgent cells.

Sustained security.... facilitate social
reform.... help to convince the local population that the government is serious about protecting them. The overall objective,
of course, would be winning their active support, whereupon they would presumably begin providing the government with intelligence
on those insurgents who have "gone to ground" in the secured area.

Well, Krepinevich, a retired
lieutenant colonel, is Executive Director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and Distinguished Visiting
Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, and, when a major with the Strategic Plans and Policy Division of the
Army, wrote The Army and Vietnam. Maybe he knows something. Counterinsurgency is his thing.

And he received a major endorsement from "the house conservative"
at the New York Times, David Brooks, in an op-ed piece on Sunday the 28th - Winning in Iraq - and Brooks notes a minor bandwagon effect:

The article is already
a phenomenon among the people running this war, generating discussion in the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the American Embassy in
Baghdad and the office of the vice president.

Krepinevich's proposal is hardly new. He's merely describing a classic
counterinsurgency strategy, which was used, among other places, in Malaya by the British in the 1950's. The same approach
was pushed by Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt in a Washington Post essay back on Oct. 26, 2003; by Kenneth Pollack in Senate
testimony this July 18; and by dozens of midlevel Army and Marine Corps officers in Iraq.

... The core insight is
that you can't win a war like this by going off on search and destroy missions trying to kill insurgents. There are always
more enemy fighters waiting. You end up going back to the same towns again and again, because the insurgents just pop up after
you've left and kill anybody who helped you. You alienate civilians, who are the key to success, with your heavy-handed raids.

Yeah, but you show them
who's boss, and let them know no one messes with us. (Of course that doesn't get you very far - but it feels good, and polls
well.) So now instead of trying to kill insurgents it's more important to protect civilians? We set up safe havens where we
can establish good security and because we don't have enough manpower to do this everywhere all at once, we select a few key
cities and take control there? Not very sexy.

It sounds so simple. Why aren't we doing this? Brooks notes this:

If you ask U.S. officials
why they haven't adopted this strategy, they say they have. But if that were true the road to the airport in Baghdad wouldn't
be a death trap. It would be within the primary oil spot.

The fact is, the U.S. didn't adopt this blindingly obvious
strategy because it violates some of the key Rumsfeldian notions about how the U.S. military should operate in the 21st century.

First, it requires a heavy troop presence, not a light, lean force. Second, it doesn't play to our strengths, which
are technological superiority, mobility and firepower. It acknowledges that while we go with our strengths, the insurgents
exploit our weakness: the lack of usable intelligence.

Third, it means we have to think in the long term. For fear
of straining the armed forces, the military brass have conducted this campaign with one eye looking longingly at the exits.
A lot of the military planning has extended only as far as the next supposed tipping point: the transfer of sovereignty, the
election, and so on. We've been rotating successful commanders back to Washington after short stints, which is like pulling
Grant back home before the battle of Vicksburg. The oil-spot strategy would force us to acknowledge that this will be a long,
gradual war.

So it's not going to happen.
Seems so. Don't have the troops, it isn't high-tech, and it works really, really, really slowly. Other than that, it's a cool
idea.

First and foremost is
the fact that Krepinevich had to write it at all. He acknowledges that even now, more than two years after the occupation
began, the Army is still not committed to a counterinsurgency strategy. Whether or not his oil spot approach is correct, this
can only leave you shaking your head. If we're still not committed to counterinsurgency as our overwhelmingly primary
mission in Iraq, it seems unlikely that anything is going to change that.

Second, there's a lot of wishful thinking
in Krepinevich's essay. It depends heavily on figuring out how to navigate the internal politics of Iraq's 150 tribes; gaining
the trust of local leaders; mounting successful, large scale reconstruction projects; and improving our intelligence operations
by an order of magnitude. Any strategy that depends on doing all these things successfully is walking on a very thin tightrope.

Third, Krepinevich suggests that our first target for oil spot operations should be Baghdad and Mosul. I almost choked
when I read that. Baghdad? There's certainly no question that securing Baghdad would be good news indeed, but that's not a
"spot," it's a city of 5 million people. I'd sure like to see his approach proven on a more modest scale before tackling Baghdad.

The fourth issue is what
Drum calls "some serious waffling in his essay: he's anti-withdrawal but he's also pro-withdrawal." The numbers don't add
up, or match any real timeline.

Krepinevich thinks we
can do this with 120,000 troops in Iraq, and significant reductions thereafter. How does he figure? The British had about
20 security personnel for every 1,000 persons in Malaysia, which he cites as a model of counterinsurgency. Baghdad alone has
6,000,000 people, so that would take 120,000 troops right there. Does the US really want to rely on the increasingly out-of-control
militias in Iraq? Wouldn't that create as many problems as it solved? (Iraq would resemble El Salvador in the 1980s, which
was not successful at all.) Also, presumably the US would need different types of soldiers: fewer heavy vehicles, more
police types, more translators, a different type of force structure. Is that feasible?

More crucially, though, consider
the political problems with this approach here at home. First, Bush would have to admit that the occupation is going
poorly, to say the least, and that the military will now have to completely readjust its strategy and stay in Iraq for, oh,
another decade. Second, a counterinsurgency strategy, presumably, works best when the contractors responsible for aid and
reconstruction aren't looting and pillaging the country. Just saying... Third, in the short term, many more soldiers are likely
to get killed if the US switches to a "traditional" counterinsurgency strategy. It's just the nature of the thing - the troops
have to mingle with the locals, walk around in small units, integrate with trained Iraqi units, rely on translators of dubious
loyalty. No more zooming by in armored Humvees. This may prove more effective in the long run, but in the short run, people
are getting blown up. See how this strategy holds up after a few nights of that on the evening news.

Other than that, it's a
cool idea.

So that's the news of the buzz among policy wonks. All moot, really, given our current leadership, but
under discussion.

This is about the core disagreement over the value of moral and material strength, "with the left placing a premium
on the former and the right on the latter." –

The right (broadly speaking)
can't fathom why the left is driven into fits of rage over every Abu Ghraib, every Gitmo, every secret rendition, every breach
of civil liberties, every shifting rationale for war, every soldier and civilian killed in that war, every Bush platitude
in support of it, every attempt to squelch dissent. They see the left's protestations as appeasement of a ruthless enemy.
For the left (broadly speaking), America's moral strength is of paramount importance; without it, all the brute force in the
world won't keep us safe, defeat our enemies, and preserve our role as the world's moral leader...

War hawks squeal
about America-haters and traitors, heaping scorn on the so-called "blame America first" crowd, but they fail to comprehend
that the left reserves the deepest disdain for those who squander our moral authority. The scars of a terrorist attack heal
and we are sadder but stronger for having lived through it. When our moral leadership is compromised by people draped in the
American flag, America is weakened. The loss of our moral compass leaves us rudderless, open to attacks on our character and
our basic decency. And nothing makes our enemies prouder. They can't kill us all, but if they permanently stain our dignity,
they've done irreparable harm to America.

The antiwar critique of Iraq is that it is an immoral war and every resulting
death is a wrongful one. Opponents of the war view the invasion and occupation as a dangerous and shameful violation of international
law. Iraq saps our moral strength and the sooner we leave the better. Opposing the invasion on the grounds that the administration
lied its way into it, they see every subsequent death, American or foreign, as an ethical travesty and a stain on America's
good name.

There may be no bridging
that gap.

They will have none of this "oil patch strategy" –

... to many of Bush's
supporters, anything short of 'victory' is a weakening of America in the eyes of its enemies. They believe we are "taking
the fight to the enemy," with the word 'enemy' defined so over-broadly as to conflate Iraq and the attacks of September 11th.
It's the "kicking ass and taking names" mentality, moral justifications be damned. Revenge for being attacked is rationale
enough. Material strength trumps moral strength.

Bush plays to the basest instincts of this crowd, but he and his
handlers know it's not enough. If the left values moral strength over material strength and the right values material strength
over moral strength, the common ground between the two, and the place where Bush would find his widest base of support, is
a case where material strength is put to use for a moral cause. Bush et al want desperately to prove that Iraq satisfies both
conditions. That's why the Sheehan-Bush battle revolves around the words "noble cause."

Faced with the disintegration
of the original rationale for war, Bush and his supporters are scrambling to find the elusive moral ground to undergird America's
presence in Iraq. But when you're on the record invading a country because it was a grave threat and the threat never materializes,
you're left with little but a means-ends argument to justify it. In the eyes of the war's opponents, Bush and his apologists
are mired in an ethical swamp trying to justify the mess they created.

Read the rest. It's interesting,
arguing we need to adhere strictly to the rule of law, to basic moral precepts, and to established principles of international
relations, "something that this administration has failed to do, and that the administration's supporters can dance around
but can't justify." Daou doesn't care much for "retroactive ethical justifications for the invasion and occupation of Iraq
are flimsy at best."

But of course, the Bush apologists would call him an appeaser, and Ann Coulter would call him
a traitor.

I wonder what they're saying about this Krepinevich and this "oil spot" idea? Doesn't matter - it's just
policy wonk stuff.

People are naturally
suspicious of power and, because of that, it behooves us to ensure that others can trust us and rely upon us behave morally
and ethically. Breaking treaties, throwing off old friends and partners, ignoring our own constitution and the rule of law
creates an impression that the United States is unreliable, immoral and aggressive. It makes us less safe. Only shallow people
think that our country can fight off the whole world. Only delusional people would want us to try. Our moral authority is
not an impediment that we can or should toss off when it is inconvenient. It is an absolutely necessary component of our national
security.

We are in the middle of a great culture war in this country in which liberals are continually accused of
being immoral and indecent by people who profess to hold strong religious beliefs. These morals, however, are almost exclusively
confined to personal sexual matters and seem only to apply to the conduct of individuals in their private lives. They seem
to have nothing to say about our government conducting itself without regard to morality whenever it is convenient. (Indeed,
we have just witnessed one of the most prominent religious moralists in the country calling for our government to assassinate
the leader of an oil rich country because it would save money.)

After the last election I read many pieces
in which religious people advised that Democrats had to begin speaking in religious terms and appeal to voters on a moral
basis. It was immediately assumed that this should be done in exactly the same way that the Republicans do, using their definition
of morality. But I would suggest that we should make our own case for moral values - as a government and a nation. It is there
that we will find common ground among truly religious people and non-religious people of all stripes. And it is there that
politics and morality are appropriately and necessarily linked in a free and democratic society.

If I had been polled
after the last election I might very well have said that moral values were a primary reason for my vote. I found the conduct
of this war deeply immoral. And I also believe that this immorality makes us less safe. If Democratic politicians want to
run on restoring moral values in government they can count me in. I'm a proud member of that moral values crowd and I'll happily
hold hands with any religious person who wants to join me.

But as he points out, that
is now how they - the Pat Robertson crowd - define moral values.